Walk, Bike, Ride, or Drive?

MIT’s interactive city maps aim to show the most efficient modes of transportation

Molly Hurford

The best ways to commute in Manhattan (from the location shaded in green).

(Image courtesy of You Are Here)

What’s the best way to commute in any given city? While we’d love to say that bikes are always the fastest mode of transportation, even we’re willing to admit that there are times when public transit, walking or even (gasp!) driving are more efficient.

The website YouAreHere.cc, a project from the Social Computing Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, suggests the best modes of transit in 12 cities through easy-to read, interactive maps. Just click on your departure point, and the map will color-code the rest of the city to show the fastest option to your destination: walking, cycling, public transit, or driving.

For example, from Midtown in Manhattan, public transit and cycling are tied for the best ways to get around the city, while driving is recommended only for far-flung destinations like Washington Heights. Part of the reason driving is rarely the best mode in Manhattan is that the map takes into account time to park and walk to the destination. Cycling, on the other hand, means simply locking a bike in front of your destination and popping in.

The site does admit that the maps aren’t all-encompassing—they don’t take “the true cost of each mode of transport, including the cost of the vehicle, the cost of fuel, and the effect on air quality” into consideration. They say that if taken into account, “In those calculations, walking and bicycling would cover even more area.” Plus, there’s the fact that riding is simply more fun than waiting for a train, even if it adds a few minutes to your trip.

To make the maps, students gridded up the cities and then “computed the time using each mode of transport from the centroid of the source block group to the centroid of the destination block group using the Google Maps API.” They then compared the respective times, and color-coded to show which was the fastest.

Even in Manhattan, the map shows that driving, especially uptown, can be faster than riding or hopping on the bus, and the bigger, more sprawling cities like San Francisco and Portland are almost entirely red, meaning it’s simplest to drive from place to place.

However, in many of the cities—Cambridge, Massachusetts, in particular—cycling is king, or at least a close second to driving. And public transit was surprisingly poorly represented in many of the maps, while walking was most feasible only in the immediate area surrounding departure points.

Sep Kumar, one of the project's creators, explains, "If you factor in the true cost of transportation, including cost to the consumer as well as externalized costs such as emissions and accidents, what you'll find is that the bike is by far the most efficient form of urban transportation."

The goal of the project? The MIT students say they wanted to “shed light on the way accessibility shapes one's experience of the city, and the need to plan our streets for multiple uses.”